Showing posts tagged os x

Where’s My Library Folder in OSX Lion?

In Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

That’s it. I wonder when that option will simply be added to Finder preferences or somesuch.

[Post-Lion Install] CS4ServiceManager: Eff-Off

After installing OSX Lion on my MacBook Pro, I was annoyed by a dialog upon startup that stated:

To open “CS4ServiceManager,” you need a Java runtime. Would you like to install one now?

(My answer: “No.”)

This is a Photoshop CS4 nag utility that I didn’t want to have running on my machine all the time. I also did not want to install a Java Runtime just to run this stupid thing. How did I get rid of it?

Photoshop’s support site was barely supportive: A knowledge-base article informs us that we can create a custom plist file to disable CS4ServiceManager.

Ugh. Instead of doing that, l used launchctl:

launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe.CS4ServiceManager.plist

Haven’t seen it since.

Now, I won’t receive auto-update notices, but there are some apps that I prefer to manage on my own time. (If forced to choose, I would prefer that my app check for updates during launch.)

(P.S.: With launchctl, I can also disable a bunch of other auto-updater agents, like Google’s App Engine updater by applying unload -w to com.google.keystone.agent.plist)

pbcopy: Copying and Pasting from the Command Line

One of those things I will not use very often, but will come in very handy if I ever remember it. Noting it here to help me along: pbcopy accepts standard input and puts it onto your OSX clipboard. For example,

cat /somewhere/on/your/volume/textfile | pbcopy

Will pretty much put all the text in textfile onto the clipboard. There’s a corresponding pbpaste that will write the clipboard’s contents to standard output.

Uninstalling Evernote (Mac)

I’m documenting my uninstall steps for Evernote build 62233 on OS X Snow Leopard.

I tried Evernote for a week. Despite the decent user experience, the system didn’t catch on, so I wanted to remove it. Turns out that it doesn’t have an uninstaller, not even a command-line uninstall script. Neither the support website nor the online documentation has any information about uninstalling. Deleting the application itself does not remove everything. I still found right-click menus in Safari, and entries for Evernote in Growl notifications. Thus, I’m sharing what I did to clean this up. This is what worked for me. I make no guarantees for you.

  1. Quit the app up in the menu bar
  2. Deleted the application from the Applications folder
  3. Rebooted
  4. Deleted all of the following in the order listed (and made sure Safari wasn’t running):
  5. ./Library/Internet Plug-Ins/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin.webplugin/Contents/MacOS/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin
    ./Library/Internet Plug-Ins/EvernoteSafariClipperPlugin.webplugin
    ./Library/Application Support/Growl/Tickets/Evernote.growlTicket
    ./Library/Application Support/Evernote/data/<12345>/Evernote.sql
    ./Library/Application Support/Evernote

Update: some dude from Evernote left a comment about one more file that needs removing. Thanks, Andrew!

Update #2: Thomas Reggi pointed out that “Evernote Helper” still lingers in your login items. 

Lingering EvernoteHelper in Login Items

This got me thinking about what else could possibly be lingering, well over a year after I did my “uninstall.” So, I checked defaults:

defaults read com.evernote.Evernote | grep -i evernote

shows:

"com.evernote.Evernote" = { ENIncomingEmail = "[email protected]"; SUFeedURL = "http://update.evernote.com/public/ENMac/EvernoteMacUpdate.xml"; }

To clear this out, I had to do this:

defaults delete com.evernote.Evernote

Comments (imported from the old blog):

Nov 14, 2009:

Andrew McGeachie said…
You’ll also want to delete:

./Library/Caches/Metadata/com.evernote.Evernote

which contains the spotlight metadata.

Jan 31, 2010:

sarag925 said…

wait, is this deleted from terminal?
Robert Otani said…

@sarag925: yes, use Terminal.

Feb 26, 2010

Peter Blomqvist said…
Hi,

Silly question:

Does it matter in which order you delete the items? For example, shouldn’t you delete Evernote.sql before you delete Evernote? How does it work?

Best regards,

Peter (Confused amateur)

Feb 26, 2010

Robert Otani said…
Peter: thanks for asking, I updated my post to show the order that I deleted the files.

Feb 26, 2010

Peter Blomqvist said…
Hi,

Silly question:

Does it matter in which order you delete the items? For example, shouldn’t you delete Evernote.sql before you delete Evernote? How does it work?

Best regards,

Peter (Confused amateur)

Feb 26, 2010

Robert Otani said…
Peter: thanks for asking, I updated my post to show the order that I deleted the files.

Jun 12, 2010

Thinkingman.com said…
Not to start a flame war, but I tried Evernote and wasn’t impressed. While the OCR worked a bit better than the average, it wasn’t enough value for their monthly fee, which for my notes was going to be upwards of $80/month. On top of that, I had a heck of a time trying to uninstall that darned software; I couldn’t find instructions anywhere, and for some reason my previous searches for Evernote items didn’t include some of the files above. Mahalo for the pointers and in helping us get on the right track with this.

Jun 18, 2010

Uninstall Program said…
Your article should help many people in trouble.

Jun 28, 2010

Bill Westerman said…
Thanks, man, worked like a charm.

Jun 30, 2010

Michele said…
I’m using Evernote_83438.dmg with Snow Leopard 10.6.4 and still stuck uninstalling Evernote. Whenever I start Evernote it crashes during the Thumbnail Generation. It continually tries to pull up my old notes. One of the notes must have corruption as it always fails on the same note. I’ve removed all notebooks from another machine. When I login Evernote at the website my data is clean on the website. Something is stilled cached on my mac because even though I have tried to remove every bit of Evernote that I can find via Finder & in Terminal, the new installation still tries to pull up my old notes.

Jul 31, 2010

Ari said…
Thank you!

Aug 25, 2010

Pspiliotis said
You can always use an app like AppCleaner or CleanApp or something similar. It’s a lot easier

Sep 15, 2010

petruc said
Thank you guys for the help.

There’s, though, a menu entry on the “Print” window’s “PDF” button, “Save PDF to Evernote”, which is not contemplated by the step-by-step guide. Just select “Edit menu…” right from the menu itself and you’ll be able to remove it.

Sep 22, 2010

Uninstall Evernote » frEdSCAPEs 3.0 said
[…] Ik heb dit niet zelf bedacht. Ik vond deze info op ~ Uninstalling Evernote (Mac) |Ontanistudio.com […]

Nov 16, 2010

kontikitu said
I am the world’s most enthusiastic Evernote fan and no, I don’t work for them. You might try it again as it’s improved quite a bit including PDF support even for free users.
You might also consider downloading a free little jewel called AppCleaner which totally makes up for Mac’s poor uninstall protocol. http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/
@Thingkingman - The most Evernote charges for unlimited “pro” account is about $45 per year. The least they charge for the account I use (no video support) is zero $.

Jan 02, 2011

Onassis said
Thanks for this tip. I actually like Evernote very much, but I find that I don’t use the desktop app much. The web based app is just as functional and I find that when I do need to take notes I am usually at a place with internet access. And I like having a clean Application bar. There are way too many apps running in the background and I don’t like it. It’s a new year and I’m cleaning up. :)

Uninstalling RazerPro Mouse Drivers on OS X Leopard (SteerMouse FTW)

I was already using SteerMouse, but wanted to try out the RazerPro 1.6.x drivers for my Razer Diamondback on my OS X Leopard system, only to find out that I should have just stayed with the tried-and-true SteerMouse. The Razer website provides the following instructions for removing the RazerPro drivers from one’s machine:

There are 2 methods to uninstall the drivers. Note that the below does not remove the SystemLoginItem entry in the system preference.
  1. Run the uninstall.sh file that is included in the driver package.
  2. Launch the Terminal Application. Copy and paste the below commands one at a time.

    sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/RazerPRODriver.kext
    sudo rm -r "/Library/Application Support/Razer/RazerPRODaemon.app"
    sudo rm -r /Library/PreferencePanes/RazerPRO.prefPane
    rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.razer.PRO.plist
    sudo rm -r /Library/Receipts/Razer\ PRO.pkg

While that cleaned up the important stuff, and allowed me to use SteerMouse again, I noticed that the RazerPRODaemon was still running…

2055 ?? 0:00.05 /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/RazerPRODaemon.app/Contents/MacOS/RazerPRODaemon

Killing the process won’t work (the daemon will launch again). I needed to remove a lingering .plist file:

sudo rm -r /Library/LaunchAgents/com.razer.PRO.RazerPRODaemon.plist

After killing the daemon, I removed the whole app:

sudo rm -r /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/RazerPRODaemon.app

That did the trick.

Comments (imported from the old blog):

Aug 19, 2008

Stephen said…
Thanks for the tip. That seemed to fix my problem :)

Dec 27, 2008

darron said…
Thanks for the tip too - what a pain the Razer software is.

Feb 06, 2009

Brian said…
I have been wrestling with this thing for a bit. The directions you gave didn’t quite work for me because the daemon relaunched even after I removed .plist file(?!) With that running, it won’t let you delete the app. But I could open the content of the RazerPRODaemon.app and found the actual daemon. That I could delete, then I killed the running daemon again, which didn’t restart this time, and removed the rest of the R~.app.

Would not have solved it without you pointing me in the right direction, thanks for the help! 

Post-Migrated Mac Taking too Long to Shutdown?

I ran Migration Assistant to copy the account on my MacBook Pro to a desktop Mac (as in an iMac, Mac Pro, or perhaps even a home-spun concoction if you are so willing?) After doing so, I found that restarting, shutting down, or logging-out took way longer than expected.

Inspecting the shutdown log in console, I found a suspicious message:

5/3/08 11:04:20 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the following to launchd: /etc/mach_init.d/dashboardadvisoryd.plist

Turned out that I needed to remove an incompatible dashboard extension (in my case it was iStat Pro).

Shutdowns, reboots, and logouts are now back to normal again :D